Tantric Jesus: The Erotic Heart of Early Christianity

PART I

Five Roots of Christian Tantra

Find the center

Around which everything revolves—

Stand here and be flooded with joy.

LORIN ROCHE, THE RADIANCE SUTRAS

(VIJNANA BHAIRAVA TANTRA)

[Jesus said,] "I have said these things to you

So that my joy may be in you,

And that your joy be complete."

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (15:11)

1

Introduction to Christian Tantra

Tantra is the hot blood of spiritual practice. It smashes the taboo against unreasonable happiness; a thunderbolt path, swift, joyful, and fierce.

CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

And I say: can [those], who have in [their] hearts the Divine Fire of the Holy Spirit burning naked, not be set on fire, not shine and glitter and not take on the radiance of the Deity in the degree of [their] purification and penetration by fire?

ST. SIMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

Set as jewels within the fairy chimney rock formations of the high desert of central Turkey, historic hermit caves dot the mountainsides of Göreme, Cappadocia. I came to these caves nursing a recent disappointment. Only a week before I had been in Istanbul (ancient Constantinople) and had gone to the great Hagia Sophia church there. This church, largely unknown to Western Christians, was the central church of Christendom for over a thousand years and serves still today as the model for nearly every mosque built around the world. Hagia Sophia had been the holy of holies of the Christian world, long before St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome took central stage in the West. Hagia Sophia had been the church of Byzantine emperors and ecumenical patriarchs. Its mosaics are rightly among the most famous and recognizable works of art in the Christian world.

For years I had dreamed about the day I might visit the Hagia Sophia. In my fantasy I had imagined walking into this great and beautiful sacred space and being struck with awe, being overtaken by the living presence of God, never to be the same again. I can still remember my expectation, the openness of my heart and spirit, as I entered this great mother of churches through the patriarchal door. My eyes were wide with wonder, and I felt my heart quicken. I crossed the threshold and breathed in the fragrance of the place. And nothing happened. The stirring beauty of the mosaics, the imposing grandeur and opulence of the space, the dizzying domes and cacophony of ancient items, like the pre-Christian baptismal font taken from a healing center dedicated to the god Asclepius, were all as I had hoped, even more so—and yet that burning presence I sought, which in my imagination lived particularly here, eluded me.

A week later, warm in the dry heat and bright sun of the Anatolian high desert, I was climbing into the small caves inhabited by early Christian ascetics in Göreme. Some of these caves were barely large enough to lie down or walk around in. Others could fit a small gathering. They served as home, chapel, and study for the early hermits and mystics who spent their lives here seeking union with God through spiritual practices, silence, and devotion. The fragrance of these spiritual seekers still lingered on the cave walls and in the desert air. The dry climate of Cappadocia has preserved the crude holy icons and textual fragments they had chalked on the walls of their hollowed-out cells over a thousand years ago, making each cave a unique devotional space created through the synergy of nature and monk. Toward the end of the day, my companions and I were brought by our guide (it was mandatory to have an official guide) to one of the refectories, or dining rooms, of these early monastics. The dining room in its entirety consisted of two parallel troughs of about twenty feet in length and three feet in depth; it was a study in minimalism. The ascetics would sit on the ground, their lower legs in the trough as if they were on a chair, with the ground between the troughs serving as their dining table.

I was gripped with an urge to sit there, to take a seat at this table where so many spiritual seekers had taken their scarce amounts of food before returning to their holy work of solitude. Our guide was clear that we were to look but not touch. Being a bit of a scofflaw, I lingered toward the back of our group as the guide began to move on, waiting for him and my ten travel companions to round a bend. Then I walked straight for the refectory and sat on the ground with my legs in the trough and elbows on the table, as countless others had done before me.

Immediately, I experienced what felt like a lightning bolt coming from the ground beneath my seat and moving up through my body with speed and power. With this lightning came a revelation, which I heard from somewhere like the pit of my guts or the center of the earth: The people at the Hagia Sophia are not your ancestors. These people are your ancestors. I began to shake and felt like I was strangely overheating. Sweat poured out from every pore, and I think I blacked out for a while. I don’t remember rising from my seat. It took me quite a while before I tried to share what had happened to me, since at the time I had no idea what this message meant.

These people are your ancestors. There exists another lineage, another stream that was outside, or maybe underneath, the power and grandeur that had been the Hagia Sophia in its prime. Tracing this stream, we find it leads us back to the original wellspring of Jesus and the early communities that gathered around his presence, before and after his death. At certain points in history, this stream has been a roaring river, bringing life and refreshment to many; at other times, it has been an underground aquifer, all but invisible.

Writers of the first centuries of the Common Era who swam in and drank from this stream used the thought-language of their time to relate their experience. They redefined the terms of Neoplatonic philosophy in an attempt to express a reality that was in many important ways contrary to the views of Neoplatonic mysticism.¹ In the same way, the initial generations of Jesus’s followers appropriated the titles of Roman power used to describe Augustus Caesar, such as Son of God and Savior and even Virgin-born, to express a very different picture of power antithetical to Rome and her Caesars. In the long run, this antilanguage was only somewhat successful. Over time, the paradox and protest that informed the early Christian use of Neoplatonic and imperial Roman language was largely lost. Christian spirituality fell prey to the world-denying and body-negative views of the ascetic Neoplatonists, just as Christ himself became more and more fused with the imperial Roman god Sol Invictus (the Unconquerable Sun).

The mystical Christianity that I tasted among its own artifacts at Göreme had thrived largely outside the official institution symbolized by large structures such as the Hagia Sophia. This lineage is not rooted in imperial power or Sol Invictus. It is rooted in a way of seeing that parallels the insights of Eastern Tantra, though from within a Christian framework.

THE REST BETWEEN TWO NOTES

As I began a more focused exploration of the meaning of what had happened to me at the Göreme refectory, I quickly ran into a problem. It became clear that much classical Christian language that might have been used to speak about the deep revelations of the mystical tradition had been drastically redefined or had become loaded with dogmatic baggage and strange associations from more modern expressions of the faith such as evangelicalism or biblical fundamentalism. In searching for a vocabulary to express the unique and often surprising insights of this mystical Christianity, I found that the traditional religious language of the Christian household was, paradoxically, not always the best choice. I began to explore other vocabularies.

During this same period of searching, I had a series of powerful visions (some recounted in this book) that included both Christian and Hindu imagery. These visions brought up new questions for me. For instance, what did it mean for me as a Christian person to have a vision that included both Jesus and the goddess Durga, and led me to an experience of the Divine that seemed to move beyond the parameters of either? I meditated upon these visions and discussed them with my own spiritual mentors, who both affirmed that such experiences could be part of a genuine Christian path and helped me come to realize that the substance of these visions would be significantly flattened if limited to only one tradition’s iconography. Our pluralistic world allows for the interplay of such images in ways that are still faithful to one’s root tradition, just as in its early days Christianity engaged the art and deities of older traditions in fruitful ways. In my own case, the insights and images of the Eastern world, particularly of Indian and Tibetan Tantra, had been very alive for me from the time of my childhood, and formed the center of my university studies.

Now it seemed that I was being called to inhabit both worlds, to allow Tantra and mystical Christianity to coexist in my heart. Bearing authentic witness to what was coming alive within me, I sought for the clearest and most useful way of expressing the truths of mystical Christianity within our own historical particularity. This work drew me into an exploration of the resonances and parallels between Tantra and Christianity. Two lines that are parallel travel in the same direction but never overlap: each remains its own reality. Yet honoring the space between them makes their resonances all the more informative. There is a pregnant silence between the unique notes (languages) of Tantra and Christianity. It is that silence between the two notes that makes them into music, and holds the promise of a deeper sounding. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke has written,

I am the rest between two notes,

Which, struck together, sound discordantly,

Because death’s note would claim a higher key.

But in the dark pause, trembling, the notes meet, harmonious.

And the song continues sweet. ²

Many Christians in the past, limited by their cultural isolation or lack of mutual sharing with other faiths, may have had a cultural or tribal reaction against difference and understood their faith in an exclusionary way. Today, deep interspiritual sharing made possible through modern pluralistic environments leads many of us to see that all these traditions can be other, legitimate faces of the Divine Mystery that carry learnings for us all. Each religious tradition offers a particular culturally conditioned picture of our relationship with the Divine. The Divine reality, transcategorical in itself, can only be perceived through categories: that is, through our own historical, cultural, embodied particularity. And one distinctive particularity can be fructified by engaging another, especially in a culturally complex world.

Stories and fables that are of universal appeal tend to cross into many different cultures. The story of the blind men and the elephant is one such story, and it is found in various Asian and European forms. In a Jain version of this fable, six blind men are asked to encounter and describe an elephant. One, grasping a leg of the elephant, says, It is like a pillar. Another, holding its tail, affirms an elephant is like a rope. A third man, running his hands along the elephant’s trunk, says it is like a tree branch. The fourth man, stroking the ear of the elephant, says it is like a hand fan. The fifth feels the belly of the elephant and believes it is like a wall, while the last man, holding the tusk, claims an elephant is like a solid pipe. After some confusion, a king explains to the blind men that each, in fact, is right, though none of their accounts is complete. It would not be possible for any single one of them to fully describe an elephant; each, however, could assert something true and meaningful from the position of his own engagement with the elephant through his distinctive particularity.

It is through the particular, the conditioned, the finite, that truth can be known; and it is because of the nature of this knowing as conditioned and finite and arising within a given context that this knowing cannot be total. According to Jain thought, an object of knowledge has an infinite number of facets (Sanskrit: anekantatmaka) and what we come to know is partial, not complete. Complete knowledge, according to the Jain theory of partial predication (syadvada), would only be possible in the hypothetical situation in which every singular viewpoint is considered on an absolutely equal footing with every other.

Resonating with this sense of the Divine as beyond full knowability is the story from the Hebrew scriptures in which Moses encounters the presence of God in a bush that burns but is not consumed (Exodus 3). When Moses asks God for God’s name, God responds, I am who I am (or, I will be who I will be). In this cryptic response, God offers Moses something beyond a definition. God lets Moses into the very heart of God, which exceeds all categories and names. So we can experience the Divine, but we cannot fully circumscribe the Divine with names, definitions, or categories.

As a modern parallel, John Hick, a modern philosopher of religion, asserts that our absolute truth claims about God are in fact absolute claims about our perceptions of God; our religious knowledge is culturally and historically conditioned. Such conditioned paths provide various ways to genuinely experience the Divine, yet also prevent our reflection on this experience from ever being objectively definitive; that is, the Divine is never fully knowable. As we can only approach the Divine through our distinctive cultural and religious particulars,*1 no one faith can claim to have a monopoly on describing the elephant, and every spiritual tradition can benefit from the experience of others.

Our particularity also includes our bodies, minds, and emotional patterns. The Divine, which transcends all categories, is our elephant. To enhance how we know the elephant, we can productively engage the knowledge that has emerged from other differing and distinctive contexts. It’s important to be clear that we are not saying that at some point we can gather enough blind men and women to know the elephant in its entirety, or to know some universal or Platonic elephant divorced from the experiences of the blind men. We never fully know the elephant, at least not when that elephant is the Divine. We can, however, come to a very deep knowledge of our own perceptions of the elephant, and we can enhance our perceptions through hearing the perceptions of others, shared in open and respectful dialogue. Perhaps we come to assimilate two such sets of experiences and perceptions. Such a process can open a living space within us where resonances arising from a plurality of belongings enhance our own native tradition and help us understand it and express it in new and life-giving ways that are still faithful to its particular genius.

It is in this context that we will lift up certain resonances that Christian mysticism has with the Tantra of the East. It is in this context that we will look to the vocabulary, images, and even deities drawn from the world of Tantra to clarify, through correlation, the path of Christian transformation. Our hope is to offer an invitation into this exciting, blissful, and powerful path in a way relevant for today’s seeker and devoid of the unwanted and unhelpful baggage of the past that would only confuse the simple but profound and life-giving truths of the Christian mystical path. Our hope is that as we explore a Christian Tantra we will dust off jewels in our mystical treasure house that have been buried for centuries, and place them in new settings that will not only bring us greater joy and vitality and peace than we have ever known, but will encourage and enliven us to be of deep service to the world.

Let us now survey the contours of some of the great insights of the tantric schools of the East that we will explore throughout this book.

FIVE ROOTS OF TANTRA

In the West, Tantra often conjures up pictures of arcane mystical practices or acrobatic sexual escapades. In reality, Tantra is a philosophy of life, love, and being—grounded in practice—that can help us reengage the deep and life-transforming truths of Christianity in a fresh way. The language and praxis of Tantra form a key that helps unlock the intense and unique spirituality of the early church and of Jesus himself.

Original Christian spirituality is a tantric spirituality. Through its insights into God, the world, and the human being, this deep Christianity resonates with other great tantric systems of the world, such as the Tantras of India and Tibet. What makes a particular spiritual stream tantric as we are using the term here? In part 1 we will look at five insights expressed in many tantric systems, though in varying forms and within diverse cultural contexts. These insights will help us characterize a basic tantric perspective. This basic perspective is not meant to reduce or fully describe the complexities of the many rooms in the household of Tantra. We will simply express some common contours shared by many tantric systems of the East in a way that will hopefully shine light onto analogous realities within the Christian mystical path. This process will help us understand how, in that space between parallel lines, in the rest between two notes, a Christian Tantra can be built in us. This Christian Tantra can inform how we relate with the Divine and help us to allow grace to transform our consciousness and our lives through powerful tantric practices native to, or at least resonant with, the stream of Christian mysticism.

We call these insights the Roots of Tantra, for they form deep subterranean anchors that are intuited more than seen. Like the roots of a plant that can send up shoots and blooms that vary depending on external conditions, the sprouts issuing from these intuited (never fully known) Roots of Tantra come to life in unique ways, depending on the cultural and historical particularity in which they are planted. Through study of multiple particularities (the leaves and stems and flowers of Tantra), we can intuit something about these roots, though never in a complete way. Remembering this limitation, let us put forward the following contours of a tantric world view:

the world is real and good;

the dynamic face of the Divine is a feminine face;

the embodied human person is the primary temple of the Divine;

engaging our primal erotic energy through spiritual practice and antinomian (anti, against; nomian, law) behaviors rooted in compassion and justice are the fuel of the spiritual life; and

a vibrant, deep energetic relationship with the living Teacher strengthens us for spiritual progress in this life.

We will use these principles, native to early Christianity, to help us read the Bible and other Christian writings with new eyes—tantric eyes. We will discover a Christian tradition that looks positively upon sensuality and even pleasure, seeing both as bound up with the spirit. As theologian Matthew Fox points out, No one who has admitted he or she is vulnerable to goose bumps can any longer believe in the violence that separates spirit and body, spirituality and sensuality.³ The Celtic Christian theologian John Philip Newell says, We need to regain confidence in the goodness of creation and thus of the body and of our sexuality. . . . This entails recovering a sense of the goodness of the creativity that is fundamental to creation’s fruitfulness and continuity.⁴ Discovering the Roots of Tantra in Christian scriptures and tradition will help us do just that.

Seen together with the insights of the Five Roots, an ancient but timely Christian spirituality emerges, stripped of the world-denying and body-negative pollutants that have seeped over the centuries into its original well waters. We will unearth a spirituality that affirms the body and its vital life force in all its expressions—metabolic, sexual, intellectual, spiritual—as a holy vehicle of the light and life of God. We will unearth a spirituality that finds God accessible in the dynamic and rapturous embrace of polarities and visible in the divine guru, Jesus Christ. We will unearth a spirituality that affirms Earth as an emanation of God and celebrates the primal energy of desire (eros) as the foundation of the mystical life.

One meaning of Tantra is instrument of expansion. Recovering the tantric nature of Christian spirituality helps us push beyond the anemic understanding of the Christian path as a collection of prohibitions or as an anti-intellectual regressive belief system. Tantra helps us remember that Christianity is not the manageable complexity of rules and regulations, but the unmanageable simplicity of being present to your life in love.⁵ The tantric Christian path is a school of love leading to divinization in this life. This divinization, this deification, is not an other-worldly process but an embodied process of becoming whole, becoming present, or as Jesus says, of waking up. It is coming to the experience of all our pieces (even the ones we’d rather repress!) being knit together in love and acceptance. Divinization means knowing our true selves as more than our ego selves. We wake up to the reality that our deepest identity permeates all of creation, that we are woven into the matrix of all things and all doings, and are at our core channels of love. We awaken to lives of compassionate engagement in the world, for the world is not other than we are.

This root Christian impulse of divinization speaks to us through two thousand years of voices asserting that God became human so that humans might become divine.*2 These voices affirm a high and holy purpose of human life, a calling that leads to lasting bliss and to the sanctification and healing of the world. These voices have kept alive the vital stream of Christian Tantra that flows from the fountainhead of the tradition. These people are your ancestors.

TANTRA AS PRAXIS: BECOMING CHRIST

The principles of Tantra are liberating in their ability to help us reframe our understanding of Christian history and spirituality. Yet Tantra is primarily a practical science rather than an intellectual pursuit. According to the Gospel of John (1:38–39),

[w]hen Jesus turned and saw [new inquirers] following, he said to them, What are you looking for? They said to him, Rabbi (which translated means teacher), where are you staying? He said to them, Come and see.†3

When these first would-be disciples asked Jesus where he lived, they were asking him for much more than an address; in those days, this question had overtones of What are you about? or What are you up to? In response, Jesus did not launch into a monologue, or pull out a theology book from under his robe, but rather invited them into an experience: Come and see.

This book is another invitation to come and see. It is an invitation to experience. In part 2 of this book, you yourself will be invited to engage in some formative practices of a tantric Christian path, to explore tantric alchemy from a Christian perspective, and, ultimately, to be transformed into your truest self, a self meant for bliss and for blessing—both receiving blessing and serving as a channel of blessing for others. You are invited to come and see, to become, and to be through a practical path of synergistic transformation.

In Christianity this practical spiritual alchemy is called discipleship, a path we follow until each of us is no longer a Christian, but a Christ.⁶ According to the great Celtic theologian Pelagius (ca. 355–420), It is not believing in Christ that matters; it is becoming like him.⁷ Perhaps it is really simply awakening to the fact that we already are participating in God, with only our own ego constructs keeping us from becoming aware of this. Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century English anchorite, affirms that as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the trunk, so are we, soul and body, clad and enclosed in the goodness of God.⁸

Such classical statements are often surprising to today’s Christians. This is evidence of how far we have strayed from the roots of the early church. The Roman Catholic theologian, mystic, and sannyasin (renunciant in the Indian style) Abhishiktananda complained in a letter to a friend in 1974 that

[i]t is the reduction of the mystery of Jesus to a Jewish or Greek concept that makes the dialogue of salvation with non-Christians so difficult. One culture has monopolized Jesus. He has been turned into an idea. People argue about Jesus—it is easier than to let your self be scorched by contact with him.⁹

From a tantric perspective, Christ is not primarily an object for belief but a living presence, the uncreated light that fills and animates all creation. Christ is none other than our own deepest identity, discoverable both in the world and deep within. Christ is both our source and our end, the Alpha and the Omega,¹⁰ the one who helps us sink our minds into our hearts so that we become whole (Greek: teleios, which is often misleadingly translated as perfect): Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.¹¹Be whole, integrated, and actualized, as your heavenly Father-Mother is whole, integrated, and actualized.

This is the injunction of Tantra. Tantra—Indian, Tibetan, and Christian—sanctifies all facets of our life so that we can experience ourselves as whole, integral. Then the uncreated light that is the life of God shines through us, and we awaken to the reality that we are not-two with that light and life. Anything seemingly outside this union is simply unreal, and this union unveils the unitive presence of the Divine in all that is. As the 13th-century mystic Meister Eckhart stated, Each creature points you toward God and toward new birth and toward seeing the world as God sees it Transparently! Thus all things become nothing but God.¹² When applied to ourselves, true Tantra teaches that it is not our ego or personality that becomes deified (thank God for that!), but rather the deeper who that we are, of whom we may not yet even have an inkling. Gaining that inkling and allowing that living presence within us to refashion our whole selves—body, mind, spirit—into inner bliss and outer blessing is what Tantra is really all about. And from this inkling arises the revelation that all else, too—forest, seabed, cypress, osprey, lover, and enemy—are equally nothing but God. And so our lives will naturally overflow in loving service to the world.

Theophan the Recluse, a modern Russian saint and spiritual master, promises that spiritual practice will lead you to the end you desire: it will unite your mind with your heart, it will quell the turbulence of your thoughts, and it will give you power to govern the movements of your soul.¹³ The Western world is a world of low anthropology, a world in which such promises seem childish in their exalted hopefulness. Today’s vision of the human person is often a sad and atrophied picture compared to the vision of the tantric masters.

Many of us no longer believe that we can achieve a real synthesis of mind and heart. Instead, we are told we must simply endure our dissonances and anxieties. Do we dare to hope that we can take part in the blissful life of God, becoming deified in our bodies through the mystical practices proven through the centuries? We are typically taught to think so little of ourselves that even if we still do have some relationship with God we rarely hope for more than being good enough, or justified in the language of theology. Justification—accepting God’s acceptance of who we are, as we are—is simply the first step (though an important one) along a path that leads from being Christians to being Christ.

In Psalm 82 (verse 6), we are told, You are gods; children of the Most High, all of you. Tantra opens us to a high anthropology: a vision of the human person as potentially divinized, inhabiting a state of connection, wholeness, and bliss that comes from cultivating (through God’s grace) a unitive consciousness through which we participate in the divine life. This participation in the divine life is not an internal experience only. It also speaks to our role in the wider world. The high anthropology of Tantra can empower us to be channels of liberation, justice, and compassion to those most in need. We need no longer see ourselves as powerless cogs in a wheel, nor are we reduced to units of consumption. The good news is that you do not initially need to believe this high anthropology. You only have to be curious enough to try for yourself the exercises in part 2 of this book.

As Jesus invited 1st-century inquirers to come and see, you are invited to explore, in a way that is both playful and serious, how profoundly your life can change through the ideas and practices of the tantric Christian path. On the way, you will learn how to reduce anxiety and anger and how to cultivate a blissful peace of mind. You will gain skill in healthily engaging and directing your life of holy longing, your erotic energy, toward union with God. You will gain a sense of identity with all that is, leading you to a life of compassionate engagement with the world. This is a path of pleasure and discipline, a path of patient persistence and euphoric ecstasy, which makes us into Christ—sanctifying us, divinizing us, for the good of the world.

The language of divinization is not religious poetry or metaphor—it is the natural and very real goal of human life that Christian disciples on the tantric path (whether they used the language of Tantra or not) have experienced in every historical period, in every culture. These tantric masters are your ancestors, too. And the divinized life they lived can be yours . . . here, today, whoever you are. Come and see.

An Ancient Prayer for Help along the Path

Eternal light, shine into our hearts,

Eternal goodness, deliver us from evil,

Eternal power, be our support,

Eternal wisdom, scatter the darkness of our ignorance,

Eternal pity, have mercy upon us;

That with all our heart and mind and soul and strength

We may seek your face and be brought by your infinite mercy

to your holy presence,

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

ALCUIN OF YORK

2

The First Root

The Reality and Goodness of the World

[Jesus said,] The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and [people] do not see it.

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS (LOGION 113)

If you do not see God in everything, you will not see God in anything.

YOGI BHAJAN, 20TH-CENTURY TANTRIC MASTER

As human persons, we negotiate reality through multiple fields of experience. We engage the three-dimensional, physical world through our senses, and we engage the inner realms of imagination, emotion, and logic through other organs of active perception. We can experience time as linear or as cyclical, and we sometimes have intimations of timelessness as well. We can perceive the activity and monologues of our own minds and from time to time can drop into a fertile stillness that words cannot describe. We can experience a sense of isolation, and we can experience a sense of connectedness and oneness with all of creation. We can reflect upon our lives and find a single, sacred narrative thread, and we can reflect again another day and find scattered, isolated events that seem empty and confusing.

As we gather and reflect upon these various fields of perception and experience in our lives—the mundane and the sublime, the joyful and the heart-wrenching—we begin to wonder what in all of this is real, and what if anything is within our power to change. Is the elimination of suffering possible, and if so, how? Are the moments of ecstasy and joy in our lives what are truly real, or is tragedy the true nature of existence? How much of our own peace and happiness is up to us? Is the world out there something to flee or something to embrace? Is our inner world more real, or the outer? Do they both exist, and if so, are they even different worlds? Often such questions are precipitated by pivotal events in our lives: births, deaths, and other major life changes.

I have seen in my own life that the answers we hold to such seemingly theoretical questions actually bear very practical results.

Shortly after my twentieth birthday, my mother died after a three-year battle with cancer. As her only surviving child, I had always been extremely close to her, and we enjoyed a deep, healthy, and life-giving relationship until her death. While I had done plenty of grieving during her illness, when she died I did not allow myself to mourn. According to my beliefs at the time, what was most real about the human being was something that could and did exist apart from the body: an eternal soul or divine spark or atman. Death was largely inconsequential, or at least ultimately an illusion. Death was merely a shift, a liberation, in fact, of the core of individual reality from the darkening and limiting husk of the physical body to something far finer.

Armed with this philosophy, I was determined to prove my spiritual maturity through responding to my mother’s death with stoic aplomb. I did not cry at her funeral; in fact, I served as the pianist for her funeral Mass and kept my composure throughout the day, being the gracious host to the many who had come to honor her memory. I worked hard to replace the difficult images of her last days and hours with pictures of her transfigured and at peace, making this substitution in my mind less than an hour after her death. I refused to engage her dead body, telling myself and others that the body was of no consequence: it was no longer her. This way of negotiating my mother’s death proved to be an excellent short-term insulator against difficult and painful emotions. As a further benefit, I was able to soothe my lonely and sad self with reflections on how spiritually advanced I must be; after all, I had not even cried at her funeral.

Shortly after her death I experienced a year-long series of dreams. In these dreams I would see my mother here and there slipping through a large crowd but could never seem to connect with her or get her attention. In some dreams I would see her walking past me but became frustrated because I had lost the ability to speak or move and couldn’t call to her. Sometimes in these dreams I would call her on the phone and there would be no answer, or I would get an old-fashioned busy signal over and over again. These dreams caused me great agitation, and upon waking I would find myself breathing hard and soaked with sweat. I would try to push down the deep sadness that would visit me after these dreams with affirmations of my spiritual philosophy: death was an illusion, all that finally mattered was the eternal soul, and I had no reason to be sad.

Finally, over a year after her death, I had a dream that closed this series. In this dream I was in my parents’ house and something funny had happened. I picked up the phone to call my mother and tell her about this funny event. As the phone rang multiple times, I thought within the dream, Oh, that’s right. They don’t have any phones there, and hung up the phone. As the phone receiver clicked onto its carriage, I woke up with a sense of calm. This time I let the sadness remain with me. I had, in my dream life at least, finally admitted that she was gone, that her death was real.

My father died fifteen years later. On the last night of his life, my wife and I returned to the nursing home late in the evening, after having gone out for dinner with family, to say goodnight to the dying man, silent and still for two days already. We arrived only moments after he died, as his body was still quite warm. We did not immediately call the nurse. Instead, we spent time alone with him in the quiet room, now only dimly lit, as night had fallen. I took a few unhurried moments to stroke his hair, touch his cheek, and offer his body the veneration of my touch and tears.

By this time in my life I was no longer an intellectual but nervous twenty-year-old. Older now, I had grown tired of using the life of the mind to absent myself from a reality that kept me scared and inwardly running. I wanted to fully inhabit my life, the laughter and the ecstasy of it as well as the equally holy times of sorrow and anxiety and frustration. Having put aside spiritualist metanarratives and exotic cosmologies, I was now more interested in tasting the vitality of the actual life I was living—an embodied life full of laughter and pain and particularity and sacredness and uncertainty—rather than keeping myself safe from finitude and sadness by holding all experiences at arm’s length.

Whether or not my father’s eternal soul or divine spark or atman might now be present to another dimension of reality, my father’s death was real. Engaging his face, trying my best to remember this sacred moment, I did not turn away from his body or from his death. My sense of spiritual reality was no longer a salvific